Cohesive cybersecurity measures are needed for today’s hybrid cloud environments. Such environments are recreating the same data center security sprawl that firms have spent years trying to streamline and consolidate.

While cloud service providers offer compelling new services, they also create isolated data silos that have to be managed separately, and impose unique security requirements on organizations. IT teams are already overburdened with managing their network transformation, and now must also learn how to deploy, configure, monitor, and manage dozens of additional cloud security tools.

The lack of additional resources, combined with the growing security skills gap, leaves security technicians with no good way to establish consistent policy enforcement or correlate the threat intelligence each of these devices produces. The result, in many cases, is that today’s hybrid cloud environments are recreating the same data center security sprawl that organizations have spent years trying to streamline and consolidate.

“For many organizations, their cloud-based infrastructure and services have become a blind spot in their security strategy. And cybercriminals are prepared to take advantage of this,” said Michael Xie, Founder, President and CTO for Fortinet. “A critical lapse in visibility or control in any part of the distributed network, especially in the cloud, can spell disaster for a digital business and have repercussions across the emerging global digital economy.”

The cloud has been a powerfully disruptive technology, transforming traditional network architectures that have been in place for decades. Housing workloads on cloud have allowed local businesses to be more agile, responsive and available than ever before. Networking experts predict that by 2020, cloud data centres will house as much as 92 percent of all workloads. According to Gartner, total spending for public cloud services in Asia Pacific is expected to increase to US$12.4 billion by 2019 with Software as a Service (SaaS) being the most progressive segment of the market with a growth rate of 22.5 percent and forecasted revenue of US$1.67 billion.